Image Masking With Shapes in Pages

You can use shapes in Pages to create unusual borders for images. You can get a rounded rectangle border for an images, or even circles, stars and any shape in the Shape tool. You can then use line borders that will conform to the shape to frame the image. This technique can also be used in Keynote and Numbers.

So let's say you want to add an image to your Page's document. Here I'm just going to drag an image from my Finder. Stick it in my document and it inserts. I can resize it and I can add a border to it by going to Format, Style, and then I can choose a picture frame border, for instance, or a line border.

Let's say I want to do something a little more special with it. I want it to actually fit a more unusual shape than a rectangle. You can do that but instead of starting with an image what you want to do is start with a shape. I'm going to click the Shape tool here. Let's select something that might be pretty useful. A rounded rectangle.

So I've got this rounded rectangle here now and let me go and expand it a little bit. Say this is the size that I want the image to be. Now if I drag and drop the image into the rectangle it will place it in there and actually go straight to the Masking tool which allows me to resize the image and move it around to position what's inside of this rounded rectangle. So I can position it like that. Hit Done.Now you can see that the image appears inside the rounded rectangle. So I have nice rounded corners. Now once you have an image in a shape like that you can you still select it and set the border for the shape.

If you choose a picture frame border it's going to kind of force it into a square there. So it's not very useful. You can see how it forces it into a square. But if you choose Line the line will actually conform to the shape. So now I could actually put a solid line around it. I could even change it to a dotted line or something more artistic like this and it will still conform to that shape. I can also change the line color to make a border like that. I can add things like Shadow and everything to punch it up a bit. But you have to use the Line, not the picture frame, for that to work.

Now you can also do this with more complex shapes. So, for instance, the rounded rectangle works. We can do a Circle here and drag the image into the circle. We could do something even more complex like a star, for instance, and I can drag the image into the star. Then you can adjust the star shape with these green dots here for the number of points. Things like that.

Or you can use some of the really complex shapes that are available in the version of Pages that came out last year. So you've got things like Objects and Animals and such. So if you wanted to, for instance, you know put an image inside of the shape of a cat you can certainly do that. Now you can see it's got that image in there which may not be as useful for this example but there can be some uses for that. You can see that the line actually conforms to the shape of the cat. So there's all sorts of cool things that we can do to punch the image up a bit.